Basel's Atlas Bio emerges from stealth with $12.5m to simulate drug trials with AI
The Swiss startup's model is trained on about two million RNA readouts from human tissue and aims to predict how a drug will perform in patients before a Phase II trial.
Atlas Bio, a Basel-based startup building AI to simulate clinical trials, has come out of stealth with $12.5 million in total funding. According to the company's announcement on 27 October 2026, that comprises a $10 million seed round led by Creandum and a previously undisclosed $2.5 million pre-seed led by First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners.
Creandum partner Katharina Wilhelm joins Atlas Bio's board. Reuters also reported the round, describing Creandum as a backer of Spotify.
What Atlas Bio does
Atlas Bio has built what it calls a foundation model trained on about two million RNA readouts from human tissue. The company says the model can simulate patient-level efficacy and safety for a drug in a virtual cohort before a Phase II trial begins. European Biotechnology reports that such a simulation takes about 12 weeks.
The company's case rests on the cost of failure in clinical development. Atlas Bio says a Phase II trial typically costs more than $100 million and takes two to three years, and that around 70% of drugs fail at that stage. If those failures could be predicted earlier, drug developers could stop weak programmes sooner and focus money on candidates more likely to succeed.
"For sixty years, drug development has been built on two flawed assumptions," said Simon Romanski, Atlas Bio's co-founder and chief executive, in the announcement.
Early customers
Atlas Bio says it works with a top-10 global pharmaceutical company. The company also says a Basel biotech client skipped animal testing in one workflow on the basis of its simulations. Reuters reported that the startup expects first trial results within six weeks.
The team
Romanski has a background at KIT, EPFL and Stanford. His co-founder and chief technology officer, Sebastian Bayer, previously led large language model research at Google. Dominik Hartl, a former doctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, leads scientific strategy. The company was founded in 2024 and is incorporated in Delaware, with a Swiss subsidiary.
The new money will go into the scientific and commercial teams, further validation of the platform and work with enterprise clients.
"The first wave of AI in drug development focused on drug design and is well underway. Now, we are entering the second wave: clinical development," said Wilhelm of Creandum.
Regulation is moving, the proof is still ahead
The timing links to changes in US drug regulation. As European Biotechnology notes, the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 of 2022 removed the requirement for animal testing before human trials, and an FDA rule published in September 2026 replaces the term "animal tests" with "nonclinical tests", effective 4 February 2027. That opens the door for computational methods to play a larger role in drug submissions.
The same publication also points out that the claim that simulations can replace parts of clinical trials remains to be demonstrated. Regulators will want strong evidence that virtual cohorts predict real patient outcomes before they accept them in place of human data.
What it means for European founders and investors
Atlas Bio is part of a growing group of European companies building virtual patients and in-silico trials. Earlier this week, Europreneurs Media covered adsilico's $10m Series A for virtual patients in medical device testing. Together they suggest that investors see clinical development, not just drug discovery, as the next area where AI can save time and money.
Creandum's role is also worth noting. The Stockholm-founded firm co-led Machenta's $40m robotics seed on the same day, a sign that large European early-stage funds are writing sizeable cheques into deep tech where the technology risk is high but the potential market is large.
For founders, the Delaware structure with a Swiss subsidiary is a familiar pattern for European biotech and AI startups that want access to US capital and customers. For investors, the key milestones to watch are published validation data and whether pharma partners move from pilots to paid, repeated use.
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